The number of nurses leaving to get a better work-life balance has more than double over seven years.
Photograph: Peter Byrne/PA

Record numbers of burnt-out NHS staff in England are quitting because they are fed up with spending too much time at work and not enough at home with their family, research has revealed.

The number of personnel leaving the NHS because of a poor work-life balance has almost trebled in the last seven years, an analysis by the Health Foundation thinktank shows.

Between June 2010 and June 2011, a total of 3,689 employees cited concerns over long working hours as the reason they had decided to stop working for the NHS in England. But 10,257 did so between June 2017 and June 2018 – an increase of 178%.

Many of those who left were nurses. The numbers quitting over their work-life balance more than doubled from 1,069 to 2,910 over the seven years studied.

The 270 doctors who quit for a better work-life balance in 2017-18 represented a 167% increase on the 101 who did so in 2010-11.

Health unions have been warning for years that NHS personnel are cracking under the strain of heavy workloads, a relentless rise in demand for care and having to work harder as a result of widespread understaffing. Many staff report routinely working beyond their normal hours simply to ensure that they complete all their tasks related to patient care and administration.

Dr Becks Fisher, a GP and policy fellow at the Health Foundation, said that while she loved her job, “it does feel pressurised” and that the NHS-wide lack of family doctors was making it impossible to have a normal life.

“The sheer number of decisions you make in a day can feel frighteningly large, and we’ve lost any concept of ‘routine hours’. You’re just there until all the work is done.

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“Not infrequently that’s late at night, and there’s an inevitable impact on personal life. On a good day, it’s incredibly satisfying but on a bad one I empathise with colleagues who decided that it’s simply too much,” Fisher added.

The findings are based on the thinktank’s analysis of workforce data collected by NHS Digital, the health service’s statistical arm, into people voluntarily quitting. They are bad news for a service that official figures show is already struggling to fill almost 103,000 vacancies – almost one in 11 of all jobs. They include 40,877 unfilled nursing posts and a shortage of 9,337 doctors.

The Mental Health Foundation has identified Britain’s long-hours culture and employees having too little time for personal priorities as a key driver of the ongoing rise in mental ill-health. “The cumulative effect of increased working hours is having an important effect on the lifestyle of a huge number of people, which is likely to prove damaging to their mental wellbeing,” it said

About 10m working days a year are lost to work-related stress.

The NHS long-term plan, the blueprint for the service’s future in England, published last month, highlighted that it would have to offer more staff flexible working in order to tackle its growing workforce crisis.

It said: “Inflexible and unpredictable working patterns make it harder for people to balance their work and personal life obligations. To make the NHS a consistently great place to work, we will seek to shape a modern employment culture for the NHS [including] promoting flexibility, wellbeing and career development.”

Sheffield Teaching Hospitals, one of the NHS’s largest trusts, has introduced an array of flexible working schemes in a bid to recruit and retain staff. That includes career breaks, home-working, job-sharing and contracts where personnel only work during term times and take school holidays off, to help families with childcare arrangements.

Anita Charlesworth, the Health Foundation’s director of research and economics, said: “Retention rates have worsened in recent years, and almost three times as many people are citing work-life balance as a reason for leaving the NHS at the beginning of 2018-19 than in 2011-12.

“Funding constraints and growing staff shortages have continued to pile more pressure on those working in the health service, squeezing as much as possible out of a workforce that is clearly feeling the strain.”

Health Education England and NHS England plan to publish a workforce strategy later this year. Dido Harding, the chair of NHS Improvement, said last October that “the single biggest problem in the NHS at the moment is that we don’t have enough people wanting to work in it”.